People. Millions of individual experts and thousands of online interest groups are reachable via external CMC networks. These constitute a tremendous resource for lifelong learning. Individual experts can be consulted and interviewed via e-mail. An online interest group (OIG) is a group of people with a common interest who convene via CMC. There are thousands of OIGs that can be accessed via international CMC networks and it can be argued that they all have some sort of educational purpose. In the early nineties, Howse (1992) stated that more than 1,000 scholarly lists were distributed via Listserv on Internet and that over 1,000 international newsgroups, carrying more than 250,000 items every day, could be accessed at Murdoch University in Australia. Internally, the institution could choose to provide access to local conferences and individual teachers, peer students, and support staff.
Information. A growing number of databases and electronic journals are available through external CMC networks. World wide web documents, catalogues, and search engines are growing rapidly in numbers. Online information probably cover most of the subjects that are taught in online courses. Online database are organized collections of data that can be accessed via CMC. Utilizing these external resources, a course provider could maintain local databases or information services of relevance to the courses. An easier solution could, though, be to provide links to external web services or access to international databases. Online journals are periodicals that are distributed via CMC networks. They are increasingly important resources for information and learning. Supporting this statement, Strangelove (1992) in the early nineties compiled a directory of about 35 electronic journals and 90 newsletters that were available via Internet. Since then, the numbers have exploded. Local bulletin boards could be used to redistribute online journals as well as other local information.
Applications. An enormous number of software applications are available via external and internal CMC networks. Online applications are software programs that can be executed on a remote computer via a computer network. They include a range of applications from software development tools; via specific applications for statistics, economical analysis, etc.; to computer-aided instruction applications. Java applications, that allow users to run remote software applications via their web-browser, gain popularity and have an interesting educational potential. A related, but slightly different approach, is to establish a software library that allows remote users to download software applications from a host computer so that they later can execute the programs on local microcomputers. Such files are available from a number of host computers. Internet provides a standardized file transfer protocol (FTP) for this purpose and a large number of PC based bulletin board systems have software exchange as their main service.